Rote learning,creativity and 'understanding' in classroom foreign language teaching

Abstract

This paper presents some preliminary findings from a longitudinal study of French teaching and learning in two secondary schools in southern England. The main aims of the project were (a) to document the course of development in French of a cohort of 60 11-13-year-old pupils over a two-year period, with a particular focus on the place in their development of prefabricated phrases or 'chunks' of language, and (b) to relate this development to their classroom experiences, which were also documented. In this paper we focus on a subgroup of teachers involved with the project for much or all of the two years, examining their classroom practices and beliefs about effective teaching. In particular we compare teachers' beliefs about classroom learning with the evidence on learner progression derived from the project's own elicitation procedures. The paper is intended as a contribution to the growing literature on language teachers' craft knowledge, which to date has not systematically linked the study of teacher beliefs with second- language learning theory.

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